


Almost

by InsubstantialPageant



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 04:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9419483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsubstantialPageant/pseuds/InsubstantialPageant
Summary: Tim's father had the nerve to die before he got back from Basic with skills and a loaded weapon.A rumination on Tim's life before the marshal service.





	

Santa Claus, Indiana should have been the happiest place on earth. 

What else could you say about the home of Santa’s Candy Castle and Frosty’s Fun Center and Santa’s Lodge? Where half its residents lived in a place called Christmas Lake and the other half in Holiday? Where the town banded together every Christmas to preserve a child’s belief in Santa Claus?

He hated it. 

Eleven months out of the year it felt like the whole town was just waiting to breathe, actors standing just offstage, waiting for a cue. And then it was one month of Christmas cheer being forcibly rammed down his throat until he choked on it.

But he’d still sit at the table and watch in fascination as every year his sister painstakingly crafted hundreds of letters from Santa Claus. They were things of beauty, these letters. A conjuring of a child’s dream channeled effortlessly into words. Line after line of cheerful lies all in her perfect copperplate. But then Katie did everything perfectly.

It was the first thing anyone ever said to him when they heard his last name. “Oh, your sister’s such a perfect little angel.” He never disagreed. After all, Katie was the one who raised him after their mother passed. It was Katie who made him breakfast in the morning and taught him to tie his shoelaces and patched up his skinned knees. It was Katie who checked his homework and went to his parent teacher conferences. She always went alone. No one ever wondered why. Or, if they did, they never asked. In public at least, their father was a perfectly fine father. 

He was eight the first time he could remember hearing the noises. The house creaked. It had for as long as he could remember. As a child, he had made a game out of trying to move through it without making a sound. His father had never mastered the knack.

Long after he was supposed to be asleep, he heard the floorboards creak in the night and then an awful, smothered silence punctuated by scuffling sounds he was too young to recognize. Then. 

He asked once, on what had come to be an ordinary morning, with Katie making breakfast while their father snored upstairs. The hand stirring his scrambled eggs paused so imperceptibly that he might not have noticed if he hadn’t spent his life memorizing her. She didn’t say a word, only patted him on the head, the gesture that before had always meant everything would be okay. 

So, if Katie smiled a little less in the mornings, how was he to know? 

After their mama passed, he’d slept in Katie’s room for a few months. The nightmares’ grip on his heart eased when he could wake to hear her steady breathing, a promise that she at least was still alive. An anchor to keep him from drifting. 

He started again when he was nine. He never explained, and she never asked. He just turned up one night with a pillow and his favorite blanket, the one his mother knitted for him, and made himself a bed against her door. He was a skinny kid, but fifty pounds of dead weight was still hard to move. 

It worked for a month. Maybe less. It was hard to remember now. It worked until he found himself unceremoniously dumped back in his room with a look that brooked no argument. “Don’t be a sissy,” his father told him. 

Not for the first time, he thought he and his father had different views on the matter. 

He began acting up at school, preferring detention to the suffocation that waited at home. He could read there without the silence crawling up his spine. He congratulated himself on the cunningness of his plan until he sat next to Katie as she white-knuckled her way through a meeting with his principal. 

No, she repeated, she couldn’t think of any problems at home. No problems at all.

She said it so calmly that he almost believed it himself. 

The next time, the principal told them, he would have to talk to their father. Tim reformed quickly after that. As far as they were both concerned, the less to do with their father the better. And, even if that weren’t the case, he couldn’t take adding to the disappointed look in his sister’s eyes. 

He followed her lead, learning her knack of saying things so dryly that no one was ever entirely sure whether he was joking or telling the absolute truth. And, like her, he built a wall of sarcasm around his heart high enough to keep the world out. Katie was the only one he let inside. Most days, he thought she let him in too, but then, once in awhile, those days when she sat at the dinner table tight-lipped and dead-eyed, he found himself trying to climb a wall higher still. 

Her senior year, he listened to the click-clack of their mama’s typewriter as Katie filled out college applications. Their father didn’t approve, or he wouldn’t have approved if he had known. College education would be a waste, to his mind, when Katie was going to be stuck in this town like all the rest of her classmates. Like Pa Gutterson himself. 

When she was making dinner, Tim snuck a glance at her essays, the lovingly crafted vignettes about a life in Santa Claus. Her sense of humor jumped off the page, but, funny as they were, they didn’t make him smile. While he recognized a handful of details, the life was foreign to him. More cheerful lies like the Christmas letters. It was as if he was reading about the girl Katie was pretending to be, the life that Katie should have had. If he’d been able to protect her. If their mama hadn’t gotten cancer. If their father hadn’t been… 

He caught her casting anxious glances at the mailbox for what seemed like months, starting long before there should have been any reasonable expectation of a response. He watched her pacing when she thought he wasn’t looking, and he watched his perfect sister shrink deeper into shadow.

“You’re not going,” said their father on the day a fat packet finally arrived with Vanderbilt emblazoned across it. 

Katie didn’t say anything. A muscle in her jaw twitched with the effort of suppressing years of words unsaid, suppressing all the things they didn’t talk about. But she didn’t say anything. 

“How did you think you were going to pay for it anyway?” Their father was almost gloating now, his superiority lubricated by seven beers, which was two more than it generally took to tip him from pleasant to overbearing. 

She rifled through the fat packet, selected a single piece of paper, and placed it on the table without a word. She walked away while they read her proof of a full scholarship. Her lifeboat. 

Then it was their father’s turn not to say anything. 

She left on a bus for Nashville with a single suitcase in tow. Their father refused to see her off, but Tim carried her suitcase to the bus stop. On the way, they talked about the weather and his classes for next year and the food she’d left in the fridge for dinner that night. By then, they had become so good at talking about nothing that it didn’t seem strange they were ignoring the elephant in the room. 

She was calm, calmer than he’d seen her in years, waiting for the bus. Even her breathing seemed deeper, like a weight had been lifted off her chest. But she held his hand as if he were still six and needed to be kept from running in the road. This time he thought he might be the anchor. Certainly, he was the one who stayed behind. 

Before she got on the bus, she kissed his cheek and told him to be a good boy.

So he was. Because that was what Katie wanted. Irrationally, he couldn’t shake the idea that she would know if he misbehaved. And he didn’t want to be the reason she had to come back to Santa Claus. He wasn’t going to trap her in this town a moment longer.

He still hated every minute of it. 

He stayed out of the house – he never called it home anymore – as much as he could. He barely returned even to sleep; he haunted the library instead. He never saw his father if he could help it. 

She never came home for vacation, and he never asked why. After the first Christmas, she didn’t even bother to offer him an excuse. None was needed. 

She wrote him letters faithfully every week. She told him magical tales of her college life, of classes and football games and parties. But he remembered the letters from Santa filled with false promises, and he never knew how much to believe. 

It would be simple to think that the mere change in scenery solved all problems. That would mean there was hope for him too. But part of him was afraid of having hope. 

When he was thirteen, her sophomore year, she told she had saved enough for a security deposit on her own apartment. It was only a one-bedroom, but there would be room enough for the two of them. He exhaled the breath he had been holding for the last five years. 

He worked odd jobs, mostly as the most morose, sarcastic elf in the history of Santa Claus, to scrape up the money for the bus ticket. His father didn’t come to see him off either, but then Tim didn’t give him a chance. He just left a note on the table one day, and he didn’t look back. 

The apartment in Nashville was small and old. It hadn’t been renovated since the 60s at least. The cupboards didn’t always close properly, the pipes rattled in the morning, and the walls were thin enough that he knew more than he ever wanted about the lives of the Frists next door. But the landlady kept an eye out for Katie. And there were fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies waiting when they got home that first day and most days thereafter. 

It felt like home in a way that Santa Claus hadn’t. They played Scrabble at night once he finished his homework. Katie won most days; he would have done better if he wasn’t always trying to play the word most likely to make her laugh. They slept on kids’ bunk beds in the tiny bedroom because it was the only way to fit two beds. He grew five inches over one summer until his feet dangled over the edge of the cramped top bunk, but he never complained. Katie baked when she was happy. Tim ate mountains of baked goods to the point that he was no longer the skinniest kid in class. 

If he didn’t know better, he would have said it was almost like something out of the Waltons.

He pretended not to notice that sometimes she would stay up at night, staring at a mounting stack of bills. He went out one day without telling her and got a job bagging groceries. He spent most Saturdays thereafter asking people if they wanted paper or plastic, and he learned how to maintain his focus even during the most boring times. He earned enough that Katie gave him twenty dollars and told him to go buy the comic books he’d been dreaming about. He bought more board games instead. 

Their father didn’t come for her graduation. It wasn’t unexpected. Tim hadn’t talked to him in two years, and Katie never said the word Dad, not to Tim or anyone. 

Tim cheered harder and louder than anyone when his sister’s name was called. _Summa cum laude._ His perfect sister was still perfect even after everything. He had never been prouder. 

She got a job doing human resources at the VA Hospital. The salary was good enough that they could move into a two bedroom apartment and buy a bed both he and his feet could sleep in at the same time. This apartment was bigger and newer. The cupboards stayed shut and the pipes didn’t rattle. But sometimes he missed hearing the Frists reading stories to their kids and his sister breathing steadily in the bunk below.

There were days when he almost believed they were normal. He went to school, picked up his hours at the store, and retreated to the hospital to do his homework in a corner of Katie’s office. The women there all liked to muss his hair, while the men offered to take him to a Sounds game and glanced over to see if Katie had noticed the gesture.

He’d always known his sister was beautiful in the same way that he knew the Sistine Chapel was beautiful: People wouldn’t shut up about it. It had become the first thing that anyone said to him when they found out he was her brother. He always gave them his best shit-eating grin all the while thinking, “No kidding, dipshit.”

He could see the tension in her shoulders, along with a too familiar hunted look in her eyes, when the guys tried to flirt. She put them off so dryly that she was gone long before the would-be Romeos realized that she’d told them to get lost. They spent Saturday night on the couch watching movies instead.

He enlisted the day after he graduated high school. His grades were good – because Katie insisted – but not quite good enough to get him a full scholarship like hers. They were comfortable now, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew well enough that they couldn’t afford to put him through college on their own dollar. He had put in a few applications to make Katie happy, but he had always known what he was going to do. He wasn’t about to be any more of a burden than he’d already been. 

He wasn’t sure how she was going to react when he told her. He waited until he’d opened his graduation gift – a watch—and they were eating leftover cake. (Katie had gone a bit overboard and made a cake large enough to feed an army when it was only them two.) She put her fork down and blinked at him. Once. Twice. He caught a flicker of the old shadows crossing her eyes. 

“Anything I can say to change your mind?” she asked after a long moment where his heart flipped over. 

He shook his head. 

“Well.” She took another massive forkful of cake. “Don’t tell me I got to sew your name into your underwear again.”

“Was there a first time?” he asked, trying to think back to when he was small and gone on an overnight trip with the Cub Scouts. That was before he refused to go on any trips that meant Katie would be alone in the house. 

She arched an eyebrow and said nothing. 

He found basic training to be more of a mental exercise than a physical one. They pushed you as far as they thought you could take, and then they pushed a bit more. They never found his limit. He could take and take and take and never say a word. He’d had a good teacher. 

He discovered he had an aptitude for shooting. He could make the world go quiet around him until it was just him and the target, the firearm merely an extension of his arm. He found a strange kind of serenity in the distance the scope created between him and the world. 

For the first time, it felt like he’d found his own place in the larger scheme, here on the side of the good guys. 

He did sometimes wonder how good they really were in the individual rather than the aggregate. Back then, it wasn’t the broader mission that gave him pause. It was the little things. 

He usually kept his personal belongings, such as they were, locked up tight. He made the mistake one day of leaving out his lone picture of his sister. His bunkmates seized upon the photo, and then he never heard the end of it. He smiled at the jokes through tight lips, so none of his newfound brothers ever suspected the hell he would have rained down on them if they even glanced at Katie the wrong way. 

A week before he finished Basic, he got called up to the office, which he knew was serious. He was running worst case scenarios in his head, a new one for every step, until he knew it couldn’t be the worst of the worst because her voice was in his ear.

“Dad is dead,” she said in the same tone that other people might say, “It’s raining.” 

He wondered if she knew he had planned to go back to Santa Claus one final time. Now that he was in possession of a loaded weapon, he had meant to put an end to things. He wasn’t much of a believer in old-style Biblical vengeful justice, but he could make exceptions. 

He brought himself to ask how it happened. Surely, that was an appropriate question under the circumstances. 

“Heart attack.” 

“That seems biologically impossible.”

“Yep,” was all she said. And his bunkmates thought he was dry. 

He didn’t come home for the service. “They don’t exactly let me go roaming around without so much as a by-your-leave,” he told her even though his drill sergeant had said he could get emergency leave. She said she understood, and he knew she did. 

The old man was long in the ground by the time he did come back. Nothing remained but a headstone with a name and two dates. He almost added his own epitaph in spray paint, but stopped. Katie wouldn’t like it (although she’d never see).

She had long since gone back to Nashville. The house had been boarded up and sold to a developer. They would raze it to the ground, he thought, and build another Santa monstrosity. Between the sale and the life insurance, she later told him she had enough saved that he could go to college. “You know, after you get out. If anyone’ll have you.” 

He told her he’d think about it, and secretly hoped that she would spend the money on herself. He couldn’t bring himself to take anything from his father even now. 

At home in Nashville, fresh out of Ranger School, he was taking out the trash when the top stack of papers – the result of Katie finally clearing her desk of years of useless junk – went cascading onto the floor. He swore and stooped to stuff them back into the bag when an address caught his eye. The gas station in Santa Claus. 

He wouldn’t have thought anything of it – he knew she’d gone to see the bastard in the ground – except the date told him another story. If she’d been arranging the funeral, this particular receipt couldn’t be from the day _before_ his father finally went to hell. 

She had never mentioned going. And, if the people of Santa Claus noticed that Katie went to see their father the day before he died, they never said. 

The Ranger Instructors had remarked favorably on his ability to read a situation, to anticipate. But this was outside his powers. He never imagined she would have any thought of going back. He would have stopped her if he had. He would have gone AWOL and shot the bastard himself before he let that happen. 

Staring at the receipt raised the hairs on the back of his neck, made him feel like he was back in Desert Phase in the seconds before an ambush. Ranger School had made him more jittery than he used to be, but this was different. This was how he used to feel waiting to hear the house creak. 

For a minute, staring at it dumbfounded, he contemplated confronting her with it. But what good would that do? If she wanted to tell him, then she would have told him. And, if she didn’t, he figured she must have her reasons. Bringing it back up again would only put the ghost of their father between them. He’d sworn that would never happen again.

He crumpled up the receipt and threw it away. He made sure to stomp it all down extra hard. 

When he shipped out, she kissed his cheek and told him to come back in a fierce whisper. He naively promised that he would. 

In the wilds of Afghanistan, he found himself living in the breath between when he pulled the trigger and when the body hit the ground, in the shadows between life and death.

His fellow Rangers wondered why he never hesitated when the time came to pull. They asked about the stories he told himself, and he parroted back the textbook examples from training. The reality was that, no matter how nice the target was to the dog, he knew that there were people in the world who needed to be put down. He wasn’t about to miss. Not when lives, his friends’ lives, depended on him. 

But he could feel himself changing. The distance between him and the world expanded beyond the length of his scope. He thought sometimes that the numbness was just a reaction to the constant barrage of human suffering that surrounded him. He imagined he could put it on and off as easily as he did his Kevlar. 

Then it didn’t go away when he was on leave. Even when he was safe at home, it still wrapped itself around his heart. He knew Katie noticed. He could feel her studying him, cataloguing all the ways in which the boy was lost. Now it was her turn to listen for him in the night. He stifled the sounds of jolting awake as best he could, but she heard all the same. Just as he had. 

She baked him cookies, an expression of all the things she wanted to say. He understood. But a lifetime had frozen them both into the same old pattern of talking about everything except the elephant staring them in the face.

She tried. He woke one morning to find a stack of VA pamphlets on the kitchen table. He raised an eyebrow. “It ‘bring your brother to work’ day?”

“No, it’s ‘bring an asshole to work’ day,” she said, her eyes never leaving the eggs she was cooking. “Round you all up in one place. Maybe you can make some friends.”

Making friends was not his problem. He had plenty of friends, or at least he did. Before Afghanistan. 

He held out for a week. But he could feel her hurting for him, which made it worse somehow. 

When he finally went to a meeting to please her, listening to everyone else made him itchy. It exacerbated his guilt at not having it worse. He didn’t have pins in his leg after twenty surgeries or the resulting hankering for painkillers. Plus he was there to try and fail to talk about his feelings. He’d lost count of the ones who weren’t. So, if sometimes in the night he could still taste the splatter of his spotter’s blood on his face, well, that was his cross to bear.

He didn’t go back to the VA, though he would pass along the pamphlets to those in worse shape than he was. Being too good at his job wasn’t exactly a problem he wanted to solve, not when it was keeping him alive. 

That’s when the drinking started. After she went to bed, he would steal a drink of the wine she kept for cooking. Then he began buying for himself. He kept the bottle in his room and never bothered with glasses that he would have needed to wash and put away if he didn’t want Katie to ask any questions. The alcohol silenced the noises in his head long enough for him to steal a few hours of sleep, at least until his ranger training woke him at 6:30am on the dot.

There were some things he could still feel. Drunk was one. Pain was another. He came back from his first tour with a tattoo, which she liked not at all. She liked the second one even less. He knew, although she never said. She only asked him if they hurt. When he answered in the strong affirmative, she told him, “Yet you didn’t seem to learn your lesson the first time,” and smiled. The too familiar smile that never reached her eyes. 

She truly smiled when he told her he was getting out. 

She was less pleased when he decided he was going to be a marshal, recognizing as he did that the title changed but so many more thing stayed the same. But he wasn’t quite sure what other job a life of delivering hellfire from above had left him fit for. He didn’t think he was good for anything but death anymore. 

She helped him move to Lexington all the same. She inspected every apartment and asked all the right questions, the ones he didn’t know he was supposed to ask. He’d never had his own place before, always shuttling between home with Katie and a barracks somewhere. 

He didn’t hesitate to sign a lease on the apartment she liked best, the one where the sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows. If he believed in those kinds of things, he would have called it a sign. But he’d stopped believing long ago. 

She liked Art, he could tell. Katie didn’t like many, so this was the highest recommendation. The third morning in his new apartment he woke up to sunshine and the smell of brown sugar and melting butter, and he thought maybe here he’d finally outrun the ghosts.

He called her twice a week. By then, they were both so good at pretending everything was fine that they almost believed each other. 

Almost.


End file.
